Metropolis is an anime flick currently playing at Dendy Martin Place. I am not a huge follower of anime, but I’ve seen enough of it to be familiar with the Japanese style. To Western eyes, it’s strange. A mishmash of styles, both Western and Eastern reverberate throughout the film, from architecture to music. The portrayal of the futuristic city of Metropolis is offset by the Art Deco buildings crouched under the towering techno Ziggurat. Ziggurat is, of course, the ancient Akkadian term for for a tower, of which the Tower of Babylon was one. Probably the strangest moment in the movie, but something so disctinctly Japanese was during the apocalyptical climax – a gigantic explosion is replaced, cut out instead by Ray Charles’ “I Can’t Stop Loving You”. There’s actually a lot of jazz in that movie, intermixed with more traditional sounding anime music. Was an enjoyable movie, but it’s a surreal world those tormented Japanese minds (could they be anything else?) concoct. Tormented, and a lot of issues with self-identity. Perhaps this reflects on national identity as well. When developing countries develop, they tend to Westernised. However, arguably Japan is more modernised in the technological sense than any other country in the world, yet its culture has still stood strong (from my armchair amateur’s point of view). You get Japanese youth walking around with crazy hairstyles and girls trying to look white, but these same people bow and appear subservient in the Japanese way. I dunno, this is all speculation on my part, could be totally off the track. But yeah, the movie was a good change from the blockbusters.

Last day of work. Origin was a blast on Wednesday night, too bad about the result. Went out to catch the Brazil-Turkey match in the city afterwards, then overslept and turned up late to work the following day.

Crude comment of the night, delivered by the plastered blokes behind us at the footy who provided the night’s commentary: (To one of the cheerleaders) “Show us where you got hit by the axe!”

You know, it’s a bit of a scary thing when you realise that peoples e-mail addresses in your address book are no longer ending in “@hotmail.com” or “@student.unsw.edu.au”, but “@corporation.com.au” and “@company.com”.

Finished my IS Security exam today, just have to get the thesis proposal in next Monday, finish up at OneSteel this Friday, and I’m on holidays! Going to Stadium Oz to watch the State of Origin match (go the blues!) tonight and probably head into the city afterwards and catch the soccer. The semester from hell is almost over!

Turning your back on the President when he makes a speech now constitutes as disturbing the peace. America, vanguard of democracy, threatens arrest of students for dissenting with the President – for facing the wrong way! Does anyone else find this distinctly troubling?

yeah, bush is a real totalitarian, ain’t he?

the story you linked was nothing more than a distorted whine of a
spoiled college activist (regardless of whether you disagree with the
policies of the president, he deserves a modicum of respect for agreeing
to speak at any commencement ceremony). your assessment of it was quite
inaccurate as well.

the author writes that the police officer told him “if we chose to
leave, the charges would be dropped immediately.” sounds like what
really happened is a couple people got ejected for being dicks at a
commencement ceremony and were threatened with arrest if they decided to
defy the ejection. i see no evidence that anyone was arrested for simple
symbolic dissent.

commencements in america are often stringent like this. i know of
several guys who were forbidden from participating in graduation
exercises for far, far less than this.

america has arrested no one for simple dissent, as you laughably claim.
come on!
-Nathan

Now that is an interesting point, isn’t it? True, these students were not arrested. They were ejected, and I assume if they defied that, then charges would be pressed. Whether the police could legally press charges for an act like that or not is really a separate issue. The fact is that they were censored, and subsequently threatened. I am not sure of the exact circumstances of this report, nor am I sure of American law. I suppose it is also the right of any organisation to eject visitors to private property (the stadium), but the motivations were not exactly democratic in this instance. I’d also agree with you that this is nothing new in society, but it is also interesting to note how it does not bother some people at all.

“regardless of whether you disagree with the policies of the president, he deserves a modicum of respect for agreeing to speak at any commencement ceremony” – I would agree that his status as President entitles him to respect. As part of a Democratic nation, even though one does not vote for the President, by being part of a Democracy you agree to defer to the majority. In the same token, no one is inherently wrong for disrespecting the President in a situation like this. It is rude, yes, but there is nothing unlawful about being rude (save for instances of contempt in court etc.)

In other news, after England’s defeat, some pissed off Pommie commentators had their post-match chat broadcast out when someone forgot to switch off the microphone. Reference to “fucking Krauts” made. Commentators mortified.

Howard is 95 and lives in a senior citizen home. Every night after dinner, Howard goes to a secluded garden behind the centre to sit and ponder his accomplishments and long life. One evening, Mildred, aged 87, wanders into the garden. They begin to chat, and before they know it, several hours have passed. After a short lull in the conversation,
Howard turn to Mildred and asks, “Do you know what I miss most of all?”

She asks, “What?” and he replies, “SEX.”

Mildred exclaims, “Why you old fart, you couldn’t get it up if I held a gun to your head!”
“I know”, Howard says, “but it would be nice if a woman just held it for a while”.
“Well, I can oblige”, says Mildred, who gently unzips his trousers, removes his manhood and proceeds to hold it.
Afterward, they agree to meet secretly each night in the garden where they would sit and talk and Mildred would hold Howard’s manhood.

Then one night, Howard didn’t show up at their usual meeting place. Alarmed, Mildred decided to find Howard and make sure that he was O.K. She walked around the senior citizen home where she found him sitting by the pool with another female resident, Ethel, who was holding Howard’s manhood! Furious, Mildred yelled, “You two timing creep! What does Ethel have that I don’t have”?

In 1931, the Czech-born mathematician Kurt Gödel demonstrated that within any given branch of mathematics, there would always be some propositions that couldn’t be proven either true or false using the rules and axioms … of that mathematical branch itself. You might be able to prove every conceivable statement about numbers within a system by going outside the system in order to come up with new rules an axioms, but by doing so you’ll only create a larger system with its own unprovable statements. The implication is that all logical system of any complexity are, by definition, incomplete; each of them contains, at any given time, more true statements than it can possibly prove according to its own defining set of rules.

Gödel’s Theorem has been used to argue that a computer can never be as smart as a human being because the extent of its knowledge is limited by a fixed set of axioms, whereas people can discover unexpected truths … It plays a part in modern linguistic theories, which emphasize the power of language to come up with new ways to express ideas. And it has been taken to imply that you’ll never entirely understand yourself, since your mind, like any other closed system, can only be sure of what it knows about itself by relying on what it knows about itself.

This movie just didn’t do it for me. It’s more suited to be one of those discovery channel documentaries than a Hollywood movie. That’s the risk you take, I suppose, when you use a real-world unsolved mystery as a plot vehicle. I can’t recommend it.

I’m not a regular reader of K5, but in response to the threat of closure, K5 readers have poured in a torrent of cash ($20k over the last couple days). Personally, I’m still trying to figure out why he needs $70k to run a web site, if he doesn’t have to pay for bandwidth or hosting! I suppose that is his annual income, but an annual salary of $70k is not exactly a non-profit level of revenue…

Some would argue purchasing power parity, but the equivalent salary level of someone making US$70k in the US would be around A$70k in Australia (doing the same job). Factoring in exchange rates and even burgernomics, goods sold in the US are probably only 50% more dear than those in Australia when prices are converted to US$. I’m sorry, $70k is a more than comfortable salary, even by american standards. More so when the median US household income pegs at just over $42k.

Now, I guess Rusty (K5’s owner) may claim that if he had a real job, his skill set could earn him $70k, so he wants to make that much from K5 if he’s going to keep doing it. And I suppose that’s fair enough, but it does seem a little devious to me.

Some guy from Portland trying to get a girlfriend. I would acutally recommend someone like him to read RooshLog, there are some valuable nuggets of info on that site (and often the advice can be transferred into general success in life, as opposed to just getting in someone’s pants).

Man sued for calling chick a hippopotamus. Hahaha. If she can sue the guy for being insulting, surely the guy can sue the girl for being misleading… and causing mental trauma? BTW, a centner is about 100kgs.

I find it somewhat disappointing that MegaTokyo has not made reference to anything vaguely related to soccer, given that: (1) MT is set in Japan… Japan is, of course, co-hosting the world cup; and (2) The two main characters in MT are yanks… and the US are miraculously through to the quarter-finals. Oh well, I guess yanks just don’t give a rat’s ass about soccer (sorry, football).

Created: The Painstation. It reminds me of that James Bond movie (can’t remember which one) where Bond takes on Max in a game of “Global Domination”… the controls are wired up to deliver electric shocks, and the pain delivered to the loser increased as the wagers did. Bond, in his usual style, gets himself defibrillated several times before winning the final $1 million game.

This World Cup is absolutely incredible, never seen anything like it. Korea has just taken out Italy, 3 minutes before penalty shootouts, the match just after they sent the Portuguese home. Totally insane stuff…

Mum and Dad went to the consumer electronics show at Fox last weekend. Apparently there wasn’t much there that the Net hadn’t already reported a few months ago. Dad did spot the new Sony CLIE NR70. Very spunky indeed. I like the idea that you can turn it into a 320×480 digital photo frame. It retails at about the $1300 mark, and given that most digital photo frames go for $2000 up, the photo frame application is a very cool feature of the NR70. Unfortunately, the Pocket PC OS offers more functionality than Palm OS. The main advantage Palms had over Pocket PCs were their size (more simply = smaller device). When you try and add bells and whistles to a Palm unit, as Sony have done, the size increases to match Pocket PCs – and Palms simply don’t have the same grunt as them. 16MB of inbuilt memory is not conducive to storing multimedia, and it only has one memory stick expansion slot. Compare that to 64MB inbuilt memory and a Compact Flash + SD card expansion slot some of the new Pocket PC PDAs have. Nonetheless, the unit looks typically Sony and attaching a tiny camera to the unit is not a bad idea.

The new design concept for a new WTC looks like a Sim City Arcology. It looks massive, sticks out, and doesn’t really blend into the New York skyline the same way the twin towers did (then again, I imagine nothing other than an exact replica of them would).

Few people seem to know what the semi-circle attached to the goal area on the soccer pitch is. The semi-circle is called a penalty arc. Players must stand outside of the arc when a penalty kick is taken. That is, it serves the rather mundane function of ensuring players are at least 10 yards away from the kicker when a penalty kick is taken.

Article on FT about Monday. Everyone I know (except for ADH) has shaken their head upon hearing about “Monday”. For me, the heavily Westie-accented form of the word, “Mundy”, keeps ringing in my mind. “Oim off ta werk fer Mundy!” Bloody brand consultants, what sort of a line of work is that anyway? Perhaps as they say, bad publicity can also sometimes be good as well.

A lot of exotic creatures lurk in the pitch black darkness of the ocean depths. They all have similarly exotic scientific names too. I particularly like Vampyroteuthis infernalis, or “vampire squid from hell”. Intriguing stuff, to think about what exists down in the world’s deepest trenches under massive amounts of pressure from the kilometres of water above.

Two bits of news on OSC’s novels. His latest instalment in the Ender universe is Shadow Puppets. The first three chapters of it are previewable on his site. Secondly, Ender’s Game and Shadow are to be combined into a movie directed by Wolfgang Petersen. The only problem I would envisage is finding a bunch of 6 year olds that can act, but seeing Hollywood’s penchant for casting 20-something year olds as high school teens, I wouldn’t be surprised if we see a 15 year old Ender. Will be interesting in any event.

A woman meets a gorgeous man in a bar. They talk, they connect and they end up leaving together. They get back to his place and, as he shows her around his apartment, she notices that his bedroom is completely packed with sweet cuddly teddy bears. Hundreds of cute small bears on a shelf all the way along the floor; cuddly medium-sized ones on a shelf a little higher; and huge enormous bears on the top shelf along the wall.

The woman is surprised that this guy would have a collection of teddy bears, especially one that’s so extensive, but she decides not to mention this to him, and actually is quite impressed by his sensitive side. She turns to him… they kiss… and then they rip each other’s clothes off and go to bed.

After an intense night of passion with this sensitive guy, they are lying there together afterwards; the woman rolls over and asks, smiling, “How was it for you?”

Dave bet on Uruguay to win last night which meant that they didn’t. (They drew.)France is in real trouble now – the next game is a must win one, and preferably one where they win by a large a goal difference as possible. For tonight, I would back Argentina, but a better bet would be to check who Dave has his money on and go the other way :).

Need a guaranteed positive return short term investment? Why don’t you bet on the World Cup? BetBrain’s sure bets compiles odds from bookies around the world. Some odds are so different, that if you bet on all outcomes (win/lose/draw), you will still make some cash. The main factor that makes this work is that odds in each country are highly affected by personal factors like patriotism. I think Dave could do with this.

I learnt how to play Go last night. I love it, it’s a really cool game. You know how in chess some guy moves a pawn and the commentary is something along the lines of, “dominating move, wresting control of the critical squares from his opponent, choking his supply lines”, and every normal person is like… wtf? Well, the cool thing about Go is that you can actually describe the board that descriptively, just by the patterns of pieces of the board. Go has been described as fighting a multi-front war, and, although that’s a fairly extravagant description for any board game, it’s true. The 19×19 square board is massive – I haven’t played a game on the full board yet. Go is not Reversi/Othello. The object is not to put down as many pieces of yours on the board as possible, but to control as much territory as possible. As opposed to chess, the emphasis is on controlling space through linking pieces and not through movement. Naturally, I’m a total newbie at this game, but it’s far easier to pick up than chess.

Dave, my roommate, has lost like his fifth world cup bet tonight. That’s out of six wagers… He keeps picking the wrong team!! Meanwhile I think I got 5 points off Rivaldo in the fantasy league, plus a few more as a result of Italy denying Ecuador the chance to score. Stephen picked Vieri (two goals, six points) though, so I think he’ll shoot to the top of the table tonight once the web site refreshes. The Brazil/Turkey match was interesting, especially with the two red cards in the last half (and a melodramatic acting performance by Rivaldo, clutching his face in agony after the ball struck him in the … leg).

Just had an incredible weekend. As you know, last Friday was my 21st. It wasn’t the most auspicious of starts to the day. As midnight struck, oil was still being burnt in the form of last minute efforts for a security and privacy group assignment due 5pm later in the day. The usual flow of happy birthdays arrived over ICQ, from those still awake. Wanting to know how I was going to celebrate, I just kept telling everyone to keep July 6 free. Eventually I turned into bed a bit after 2am.

I was aroused from my slumber at 7 to the surreal sound of my doorbell ringing. I groaned a bit. The bell rang again. I grunted, made a half hearted attempt to get out of bed, but then decided to try ignoring it. Who could be so obscene as to drop in on me at that hour? For the third time, the peace shattering sounds of the bell reverberated through the air. Reluctantly I stumbled to the doorphone and grunted, “Hello?”
“Hi, delivery?”
“Yep, come up.”

I answered the door obviously half asleep, shivering in the morning cold. A woman dragging along a garbage bag stood at the door. “Hi,” she said, before opening the bag, from which immediately emerged a bunch of helium balloons. “Happy Birthday!”
“Hey, wow, thank you!” I murmured, trying to sound enthused, but I think my mind was still off in dreamland.

She bid me a good day and left me standing there in the doorway, holding a bunch of psychadelic balloons, sent to me from my gf Soph. An unpleasant awakening followed by a pleasant surprise to kick off the morning.

I got into work to the tunes of, “Hey happy birthday… so how old are you? 21? Huh? What the hell are you doing at work today??” I was wondering that myself, actually. We went out to lunch to celebrate my 21st, and another colleague’s 28th (hers was for the next day). When I got back from lunch, our assignment group had officially gone into “panic mode”. New sections were still being written, other sections being proofread. There was confusion over compilation. Over 50 e-mails, with attachments, flew back and forth. Everyone was also at work, so we were juggling our uni work with work work. E-mails switched to frantic phone calls as the 5pm deadline crept closer. At one point I rang up Skye to ask her about something. During the conversation, call waiting started beeping, but I let it go. That call happened to be Grace, who rang Skye after she was unable to get through to me. So Skye was speaking to her on her work phone and to me on her mobile. Not that unusual a situation, except that Grace also happened to be talking to Kit as well (at least I think it was him)… so there was a sort of weird four-person teleconference happening in serial. Unable to negotiate a 30 minute extension on the deadline with our lecturer, Grace, being physically closest to uni, got e-mailed the final version of the assignment. She bolted into uni to hand in our 80 page report in the nick of time. All very stressful.

The plan for that evening was a quiet dinner with Soph, with my parents supposedly coming up from Camden for dinner with me on Saturday. I caught the train/bus home. Once home, waiting in the mailbox was a present from my cousin (mentioned in the previous post). It turned out to be a gift voucher for a defensive driving course. I have no doubt it was a tongue-in-cheek gift inspired by my car accident a couple months ago. That cheeky bastard. Anyway it’s a pretty neat course, they teach you how to recover from skids, take corners properly, react to other drivers on the road and so on. As the car was still at the crash repairs – after two months, they are taking a damn long time to get it repaired – Soph drove over to pick me up. We headed off for the city, and I was beginning to feel the fatigue from the stress of the assignment. We got caught in a bit of a traffic jam and I spent my time trying to explain to her how the world cup worked, but the effort spent trying to drive and comprehend sport simultaneously was just a little too much for her :). My cousin called me up asking about his present and told me he might be around in the city later so we might be able to meet up.

“Reservation for two?” Soph inquired as we walked into Tony Roma’s on Sussex St. As we were led to an upstairs, my cousin called again, “Yep I’ll definately be in the city, where and when do you want to meet?” We got to the top of the stairs and I realised that before me was a set of closed frosted glass doors. It took me a moment to realise it was a private room. However, I find it extremely hard to talk on the phone and do anything else at the same time, and I was concentrating on the phone call at that particular moment. A few steps closer and I realised there were a bunch of silhouettes behind the doors. My eyebrows furrowed and alarm bells went off in my head, but nothing clicked. As the maitre-d opened the doors, my cousin was still chattering away on the phone and I was trying to interrupt him, “Uh… Gerald… could you hold a sec, I think something is hap–“

“SURPRISE!!”

I recoiled in shock and by reflex blurted out a “Holy Shit!” as I walked straight into a room full of screaming people. It took me a good three seconds to realise (because I was still sort of on the phone) that (a) there were a helluva lot of people aiming party poppers at my head, (b) I happened to know all of these people, and finally, (c) this was a surprise birthday party. I was half asleep at the time, but it didn’t take long for that to change. I sighted Gerald in the room and it all clicked that his call was an effective ruse to distract me up until the last moment.

Throughout the rest of the night I discovered that the past 2 weeks had been an exercise in subterfuge, deception, scheming and outright lying to me. I also discovered how downright gullible and unperceptive I am (on the walk from the car park to the restaurant, we must’ve gone past at least three cars I would’ve recognised had I not been so blind). A lot of the people there were people who had previously asked me, “so, what are you doing for your birthday on Friday?” when they damn well knew what I would be doing. But it was a mind-blowingly awesome night. Tremendous surprise, definitely unforgettable. (Even the speeches, where I got absolutely roasted. My reputation was ruined… tales about assault with a torch, profanity-filled dummy spits, and the other usual 21st stories came out. Even Hear Ye! was used against me. A post on canteen prices from over four years ago, when read aloud at a 21st sounds really sad – hey, I was doing Economics in school at the time!).

A massive, gargantuan Thank You must go out to Soph, Shen and Lill who organised everything, and to Mum and Dad who funded it :). Thanks to everyone who turned up on such short notice too, much more than I would have expected for the birthday I was planning to organise for July 6 (that I thankfully won’t have to anymore heh). The effort was much more than I deserved and really means the world to me. It’s been a busy and draining few months, especially for the BITs, and this it was just such an uplifting night.

World Cup 2002
The World Cup also started on Friday and I’ve spent a lot of the weekend watching it. I entered a fantasy league and joined a league with some mates. I’m currently coming third, but it’s tight. If you have any opinions on my lineup, let me know. I’m going to transfer in some Cameroon players later, seeing that Saudi Arabia got slaughtered by Germany 8-0 on Saturday. Cameroon are the next in line to demolish the Saudis.

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